Key West in June: Weather, 86.6°F Water, Crowds and Prices

KEY WEST · FLORIDA · JUNE

June is the month the water catches up with the air. The sea off Key West averages 86.6°F, the island gets 13 hours 42 minutes of daylight on the 15th, and the sun does not drop behind the Gulf until 8:18 p.m. The invoice for all that: 4.23 inches of rain, and an Atlantic hurricane season that opens on the first of the month.

That does not make June a write-off, and it does not make it May. June in Key West is a swimming month, an early-morning month, and a month in which the middle of the afternoon belongs to shade, a fan or the sea. The normals below say by how much, and name the thermometer they came from.

On this page

• Key West weather in June88.7°F days, 4.23 inches, 6.4 wet days
• Can you swim in June?The sea at 86.6°F
• Crowds, lodging tax and parking11% on the room, $3 an hour at the meter
• Things to do in Key West in JuneFort Zachary Taylor, the Hemingway Home, Dry Tortugas
• A two-day plan for JuneTwo days built around an 8:18 p.m. sunset
• June, May or July?How the three months compare, degree by degree
• Is June a good time to visit?Yes for swimmers, no for dry-plan travelers

The island’s own guide covers Old Town, where to sleep and how many nights to give it, and our Florida road-trip guide takes the road down from the mainland. Every figure here belongs to June: the normals, the water, the light, the fares that a June day actually runs into, with May and July standing beside it for comparison.

Key West weather in June: average highs, lows and rain days

Every figure here comes from NOAA’s NCEI monthly normals for 1991 to 2020, station USW00012836 at Key West International Airport. That is a real thermometer on the island, not a grid cell averaged out of a reanalysis, and the difference between the two is worth a couple of degrees on a minimum. It gives June an average high of 88.7°F, an average low of 79.4°F and 4.23 inches of rain across the month.

Those inches land on surprisingly few days. An average June records 0.10 inch or more on 6.4 days, roughly one day in five, and reaches an inch or more on a single day. June is also wetter than July here by 0.60 inch. Rain that arrives in bursts asks for a reshuffle rather than a cancellation, and the hurricane season that opens June 1 does most of its work between mid-August and mid-October, according to the National Hurricane Center.

From day to night the island moves 9.3 degrees. A low of 79.4°F is what much of the country calls a warm afternoon, so nothing in the bag needs to be warm. Pack a hat, a second shirt for after midday, reef-safe sunscreen and one light layer for aggressively air-conditioned rooms. A sweater is dead weight, and so is anything that does not dry by morning in this humidity.

On June 15 the sun rises at 6:36 a.m. and sets at 8:18 p.m. local time, converted from the UTC figures published by sunrise-sunset.org: 13 hours 42 minutes of daylight. The late sunset shifts the whole evening back. The Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square starts about two hours before the sun goes down, so near 6:20 p.m. in June, and runs until dusk has faded. It happens every night of the year, weather permitting.

Can you swim in Key West in June? Sea temperature and what it feels like

The sea surface off Key West averages 86.6°F in June in the Open-Meteo Marine record, taken as the mean of daily maxima over 2015 to 2024. That qualifier matters: it is the warmest reading of each day, averaged across the month, so it sits a shade above a true 24-hour mean. A 7 a.m. wade will come in a little under it, an afternoon swim a little over.

At that temperature there is no entry shock, no gasp, no argument for a wetsuit. The water runs about 12 degrees below body heat, so an hour in it still cools you down, and children stay in until somebody makes them come out. The simplest swim is Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park, within walking distance of Old Town, open 8 a.m. to sundown 365 days a year, $2.50 in on foot or by bicycle.

We could not verify a June wind or wave series for the water off Key West, so we give no figure for either. What is dated is the season: the Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30 and peaks on September 10, with most activity between mid-August and mid-October. June sits inside that window at its quiet end. Book refundable, watch the tropics in the week before you fly, and treat the swimming as the plan rather than the fallback.

How busy is Key West in June? Crowds, cruise ships and the lodging tax

We found no monthly occupancy or room-rate series for Key West, so we crown no month cheapest and none most expensive. What is dated is the calendar: June 1 opens the hurricane season, and the Keys run their headline window against the winter dry season. The documented crowd variable is cruise traffic. Key West voters approved three limits in November 2020, capping disembarkations at 1,500 a day and barring ships carrying more than 1,300 people. Governor Ron DeSantis then signed SB 1194, which nullified them retroactively. Plan on ships docking.

The one June booking that genuinely runs out is the boat west. The Yankee Freedom III leaves daily at 8 a.m. for Dry Tortugas, check-in before 7:30 a.m., with a 2026 adult fare of about $250 that covers the park entrance, snorkeling gear, breakfast and lunch. It sells out weeks ahead, so book a month in advance at minimum. Everything else on the island takes walk-ins, including the Hemingway house.

On the room itself, Monroe County levies a 5.0% transient rental tax, filed and paid alongside the 6% state sales tax. That is 11% on top of the nightly rate before any cleaning or resort fee a property adds on its own. The percentage does not move with the season: it reads the same in June as in February, on a rate the property sets month by month.

Parking is where paying more visibly changes a June day. City meters run $3.00 an hour. The Old Town Parking Garage is $6 an hour or $48 a day plus tax, the Mallory Square lot $7 an hour or $48 a day with a ten-hour maximum, the Key West Bight lot $5 an hour or $40 a day. With 88.7°F afternoons, a day rate near the bed beats circling, and leaving the car parked beats both: Old Town is flat, compact and the largest wooden historic district in North America.

Things to do in Key West in June: Fort Zachary Taylor, the Hemingway Home and Dry Tortugas

Two June numbers change what a day can hold: water at 86.6°F, two degrees above May, and light until 8:18 p.m. A swim that starts at five still leaves an evening on the other side of it, which the drier winter months cannot offer at this water temperature. The same daylight means the 8 a.m. ferry to Dry Tortugas, 70 miles west and reachable only by boat or seaplane, returns to an afternoon that is still fully lit.

Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park holds the beach most often called the island’s best: $6.00 per vehicle for up to eight people plus a $0.50 county surcharge per person, $4.50 for a single-occupant car or motorcycle, $2.50 on foot or by bike, gates 8 a.m. to sundown. The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum takes walk-ins 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, $19 adult, $7 child, free under 6. Mile Marker 0 stands at Whitehead and Fleming, the southern end of a road running roughly 2,370 miles to Fort Kent, Maine.

The sea at the fort beach reads much the same in March as in June. The air does not, and that is the whole season. The fort building closes at 5 p.m. while the beach stays open to sundown, leaving three more hours at the best temperature of the day. The Hemingway house works the other way round: arrive at 9 a.m. and you tour the grounds before the heat sets in, alongside the polydactyl cats the museum traces back to the novelist’s Snow White.

Free in June, as in every month: the Duval Loop bus, 18 stops through Old Town, though it does not serve the airport. Published frequencies disagree, one source giving every 20 minutes from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and another every 30 minutes from 6 to 10 a.m. then every 15 until midnight, so trust the stop sign over any schedule copied off a website. The Sunset Celebration costs nothing either, nightly at Mallory Square, weather permitting.

Key West in June: a two-day itinerary

Day one runs off the 6:36 a.m. sunrise. Do Old Town on foot while the air is still on your side: Mile Marker 0 at Whitehead and Fleming, then the Hemingway Home at 9 when the doors open, out by 11. Lunch and the flat middle of the day indoors, deliberately. At 3 p.m. pay the $2.50 walk-in gate at Fort Zachary Taylor and stay in the 86.6°F water past the fort’s 5 p.m. closing. Be at Mallory Square by 6:20 p.m., an hour or so before the 8:18 sunset.

Day two is the boat, assuming you booked it a month out: 8 a.m. departure, check-in before 7:30 a.m., about $250 a head in 2026 with breakfast, lunch and snorkeling gear included. You are back on Whitehead Street with hours of light to spare. If the sky turns, and an average June brings one day of an inch or more, trade it for Old Town on foot, a slice of key lime pie (Florida’s official state pie since 2006, built on sweetened condensed milk because fresh milk was scarce in the Keys before the 1930s), and the Duval Loop between showers.

Key West in June vs May and July

Across those three months the air climbs 4.3 degrees and the water 4.1, almost in lockstep. June takes the middle seat on temperature and the top seat on rain: 4.23 inches, more than May’s 3.12 and more than July’s 3.63, spread over 6.4 wet days against May’s 4.1. All six columns come from the same NOAA station and the same 1991 to 2020 period, so nothing here is an estimate.

Move four weeks back to May and you buy 2.3 fewer wet days, 2.8 cooler degrees by day and a calendar that has not yet entered the hurricane season, paying for it with water two degrees cooler at 84.6°F. Move four weeks forward to July and the sea hits 88.7°F, the warmest of the three, while afternoons reach 90.2°F and wet days rise to 6.8. Rain volume, oddly, drops.

Is June a good time to visit Key West?

Yes, if you came for the water. An 86.6°F sea, 13 hours 42 minutes of daylight and a state-park beach open to sundown for $2.50 on foot add up to a month the dry winter cannot match on any of those three counts. No, if your itinerary depends on dry afternoons or on walking Old Town at midday, and no again if a non-refundable rate is the only way you book, because June 1 starts the season clock.

If the answer came out no, take May. Highs of 85.9°F, 3.12 inches of rain over 4.1 wet days, water already at 84.6°F, and a month that finishes before the hurricane season begins. The gap in swimming comfort between the two is two degrees, and the gap in wet days is more than two full days.

What June holds alone: the longest daylight of the Key West year over water that has already reached summer temperature. May’s 84.6°F has not quite got there, and nothing later in the year comes with 8:18 p.m. light.

The last word

Settle one question before the rest: drive or fly into EYW. From Miami it is about 155 miles and close to four hours without stops, six to eight with them, running down the all-electronic Homestead Extension of Florida’s Turnpike to Florida City and then US-1 alone, the mile markers counting from about 126 to 0. In June that matters, because a late-afternoon arrival still catches a swim and a sunset at 8:18 p.m. Break the drive at the old Seven Mile Bridge, whose restored two-mile span carries walkers and cyclists from a car park at the Marathon end.

Sources & data for this guide

• June normals: high 88.7°F, low 79.4°F, 4.23 in, 6.4 days at 0.10 in, 1.1 day at 1.00 in · NOAA NCEI monthly normals 1991-2020, station USW00012836, Key West International Airport · checked Sep 23, 2026
• May and July normals used in the comparison · same station, same 1991-2020 period · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Sea surface 86.6°F, mean of daily maxima 2015-2024 · Open-Meteo Marine API · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Sunrise 6:36 a.m., sunset 8:18 p.m., 13 h 42 min of daylight on June 15 · sunrise-sunset.org, UTC converted to America/New_York · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Hurricane season dates and the September 10 peak · NOAA National Hurricane Center · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Transient rental tax 5.0% filed with the 6% state sales tax · Florida Department of Revenue, form DR-15TDT · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Fort Zachary Taylor fees and hours · Florida State Parks · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Hemingway Home hours, $19 adult and $7 child, and the Snow White lineage, which is the museum’s own account · hemingwayhome.com · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Yankee Freedom III departure, check-in and the 2026 adult fare of about $250 · drytortugas.com · checked Sep 23, 2026 · fares change
• Meter, garage and lot rates · City of Key West Parking Department · checked Sep 23, 2026 · rates change
• Duval Loop: sources disagree on frequency and hours, so we give both versions and name no single schedule · Car-Free Key West and City of Key West · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Cruise referendum of November 2020 and SB 1194 · Seatrade Cruise and Florida Politics · checked Sep 23, 2026
• Mile Marker 0 distance: sources give 2,369 or 2,390 miles, so we give the order of magnitude only · Atlas Obscura and Key West Travel Guide · checked Sep 23, 2026
• We found no monthly occupancy or room-rate series for Key West, so we name no cheapest and no most expensive month.

To plan your stay

• Things to Do in Key West: Hours, Prices, Hemingway House and the Dry Tortugas Ferry
• Where to Stay in Key West: Old Town, New Town and What Parking Costs
• Key West Airport to Old Town: Transfers, Parking and the Drive from Miami
• What to Know Before You Go to Key West: Parking, the Free Duval Loop, Sunset and the Dry Tortugas Ferry

Nearby places

• Everglades National Park: The Complete Visitor's Guide
• Big Cypress National Preserve: Dark Sky Park, Swamp Buggies and the $100 ORV Permit
• Dry Tortugas National Park: Ferry, the $15 Entrance Fee and Camping on Garden Key